In the present day, business transactions are recorded as an exchange of information between two or more parties. The information is generated by the sender and can come to the receiver via a variety of means, e.g. via a paper document, an electronic document, an image taken using a mobile device, etc. Within a business transaction it is implicitly assumed that both parties have some information about the document content and the type of transaction.
Many times, the receiving party has to validate the content of the received document by comparing the document's content with its view of the transaction. This, for example, can be achieved by a human reading the document and comparing the document content to corresponding content already in the recipient's possession. However, the layout and the forms of documents differ vastly between senders and are loosely structured, making the automatic extraction and recognition of the relevant information very challenging and inaccurate. Moreover, such manual review is both time consuming and expensive.
In addition, when the information relevant to the transaction includes geographic information such as part or all of an address, validating the received information is particularly challenging due to the lack of readily accessible and authoritative reference information against which to compare the received geographic information. For instance, while geographic information may be obtained via subscribing to a particular service, such as services relying on United States Postal Service address data, these services are expensive, and limited in scope to a particular locality. Accordingly, the available data often include only a limited portion of international addresses. Compiling a global source of data based on these proprietary services would be prohibitively expensive.
Moreover, since addresses in various international localities often follow different conventions in terms of the formatting and content of the geographic information associated with a particular location or individual, it is extremely challenging to obtain a suitable source of reference geographic information for purposes of validating extracted geographic information, e.g. address data, across various international locations and standards. This challenge is independent of any economic considerations associated with using proprietary versus public data sources, and represents a significant challenge to validating, retrieving, and normalizing geographic information representative of locations all around the globe.
Therefore, there is a current need for an improved method of automatic business transaction document validation, and particularly for validation and normalization of address information according to various international standards.